Reflections, Reviews and News from the worlds of Opera and Classical Music

Wednesday, 1 October 2014

Salzburg Festival: Charlotte Salomon, Der Rosenkavalier, Don Giovanni

[From OPERA, October 2014, pp. 1249-52]

After
György Kurtág failed to deliver his new work on time for last year’s salzburg
festival, Marc-André Dalbavie’s Charlotte Salomon became the first of
the four operas commissioned by Alexander Pereira for 2013-16 to materialize
(seen at the Felsenreitschule on August 2). However, it sounds as though the
French composer might also have given the Salzburg management a scare. There
had been substantial reworking of the piece’s Epilogue by Dalbavie and his
director, Luc Bondy, right up until the start of rehearsals. At a much earlier
stage, a complete libretto on the subject had been produced by Richard Millet
(the librettist of Dalbavie’s Gesualdo), but this was deemed too
literary and replaced by a brand new text—written in German, but largely
translated into French—by the artist and writer Barbara Honigmann.

It tells
the story of the Berlin-born Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon and draws on
the remarkable set of nearly 800 autobiographical gouaches, entitled Leben?
oder Theater? (‘Life? or Theatre?’), that she produced in the final two
years of her life, having fled Germany for France. (She died in Auschwitz in
1943, aged just 26.) Salomon designated her work a ‘Singespiel’ (sic) and
filled it with jottings and musical allusions.

Honigmann’s
libretto reflects the unusual nature of its source, and uses the same
fictional, sometimes playful names Salomon produced for herself (she becomes
Charlotte Kann) and the major players in her life (her stepmother, a singer,
becomes Paulinka Bimbam; her mother’s conductor friend is rechristened
Professor Klingklang). Dalbavie’s score takes note of the many musical references,
weaving in—and often more or less consisting of—snippets of Carmen’s
Habanera, the Bridesmaids’ Chorus from Der Freischütz and more. Salomon
herself (the actress Johanna Wokalek, speaking in German) is present on stage
as a sort of narrator of her own story, while the characters of that story are
embodied by singers (communicating in French).

Johannes
Schütz’s set, spread across the width of the Felsenreitschule’s broad, shallow
stage, consisted of movable partition walls, doors and a few domestic props;
Bondy’s direction was impressively fluid and sure, with an extra dimension
provided by projections of Salomon’s own paintings. However, any sense of the
innovative or experimental in the piece—its multi-layered premise, and the
complexity of how the story and music are built up—was undermined by its
resolutely A-to-B narrative trajectory, which prevented Charlotte, or anyone
else, from developing as a character. It might have been deliberate strategy to
emphasize how Charlotte is, essentially, a young girl, prone to insecurity and
romantic crushes, but the work fails to create any powerful sense of chiaroscuro
between this and either the tragedy that marked successive generations of
her family or the greater tragedy that eventually engulfed her—the inevitable
arrival of grotesquely masked Nazis felt automatic and almost trivial.

Dalbavie’s
music is expert, and does an excellent job of digesting quotations and
reproducing them in disturbingly skewed form; but otherwise it feels short on
identity and imagination: too much of it follows the pattern of rumbling, nervy
ostinatos building up to dissonant climaxes, and there’s no sense of cumulative
drama. The vocal writing is also rather anonymous, while the Epilogue, which
pushes the running time to well over two hours (without an interval), still
feels like a work in progress.

There was
excellent work from the singers, with Marianne Crebassa’s rich, unfettered
singing as Charlotte Kann standing out. Frédéric Antoun was lyrical and
charming as Amadeus Daberlohn (the main object of Charlotte’s desire), while
Anaïk Morel brought a rich mezzo to Paulinka. The rest of the cast, often
taking multiple roles, all gave committed performances, and the
Mozarteumorchester Salzburg demonstrated its versatility in playing the score
under Dalbavie’s direction. The net effect, however, was of a piece that was
far less memorable or moving than it should have been, and therefore a work
that, despite the best intentions, was simply not up to honouring its subject
matter.

There were
disappointments of a different sort with Harry Kupfer’s new Rosenkavalier,staged for the Strauss anniversary, in which the vaguely-defined action
seemed to rattle around with little sense of purpose on the vast stage of the Grosses
Festspielhaus (August 1). As with this summer’s other talked-about Rosenkavalier,
there was some unconventional casting: on this occasion, a tall, young and
handsome Baron Ochs in the shape of Günther Groissböck. Strauss himself in
later life emphasized that Ochs should never be reduced to a straightforward
oaf, even if Hofmannsthal at the time of the premiere—and a century before
Twitterstorms—had despaired of the casting options available to him: ‘If all
bass buffos are long and lean and only the Quinquins thick and fat,’ he
wrote to his composer, ‘I may as well close down!’. Such casting against convention
does, of course, offer potential for reinterpretation and rethinking a familiar
work, and the fact that the usual cuts to Ochs’s music in Act 1 had been opened
up suggested that there was an attempt to reposition the character as central
to the opera’s action (he was, of course, mooted for some time as the title
role).

However,
Kupfer hardly made anything of the casting, and Groissböck’s unconventional,
smartly-dressed, ‘long and lean’ Ochs—sung classily but with a lighter, higher
bass than we often hear in the part—seemed to have stumbled into a conventional
production that made little effort to accommodate him. The main effect was
that, with the loss of the inherently pantomimic and comic in Ochs’s stage
persona, the bubble of pretence and artificiality on which the opera so relies
was burst, the balance of the drama skewed. Sophie Koch’s familiar Octavian, as
a result, felt somewhat sidelined, especially since neither of the character’s
relationships—with the Marschallin or with Sophie—was clearly or convincingly
defined.

As the
Marschallin, Krassimira Stoyanova sang with undeniable elegance and refinement,
if not the requisite cream—and I wonder if it was she who had dictated a
swiftish tempo for the Trio in a performance that was otherwise not averse to a
little wallowing. But she communicated little of the necessary aristocratic
poise and was hindered, undoubtedly, by a bizarre green-velvet costume in Act
3.

Mojca
Erdmann looked the part as a pert, perky Sophie, but her voice—wiry, pushed and
thin—proved itself fundamentally inadequate for the task in hand: the
Presentation of the Rose was a trial; the closing bars of the final duet, in
which her intonation went awry, were something of a car crash. The secondary
cast was strong—including Adrian Eröd as a convincingly desperate if initially
dry-voiced Faninal, and Dirk Aleschus as a comically tall Notary—but there was
no escaping the fact that this was not a cast on the sort of level that
Salzburg should be offering.

Kupfer’s
production in general felt like an unhappy compromise between the traditional
and the abstract. Apparently updated to the time of composition, it made a
feature of vast black-and-white projections of Viennese buildings, ignoring, it
seemed, the important fact that the action of Der Rosenkavalier all
takes place indoors. In the first two acts, Hans Schavernoch’s set consisted of
movable chunks of glossy, stylized scenery in front of these projections.

There was
an entirely different aesthetic for Act 3, when we were presented with an
outside tavern—presumably in the Prater—which was whisked away for the trio and
final duet, during which Faninal and the Marschallin reappeared in a grand
vintage car. Much of it looked nice, but it felt indecisive, and seemed to
present the work as being far more complacent and confortable than it is, an
impression that was in part reinforced by the broadbrushed luxuriousness—and loudness—of
Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic.

The biggest
dud, however, was Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s dismal new Don Giovanni, the
second instalment of his Da Ponte trilogy (seen on August 3 at the Haus Für
Mozart). Rolf Glittenberg’s lavish single set presented us with a grand,
wood-panelled hotel lobby, with a bar stage left and a central stairway leading
up to multiple rooms above. I spent much of my time wondering which other
operas this set might have been better employed for; its suitability for
Mozart’s work was far from apparent, and the production offered no insight into
why Bechtolf might possibly have deemed it appropriate.

One
advantage was that Zerlina and Masetto could be portrayed as hotel staff,
reflecting for once their social standing, but otherwise there was no sense of
what anyone else was doing there. There were hints of a powerful military in
the Commendatore and several uniformed extras—I think we were in the early 20th
century—but this, like the appearance of a horned devil to save Don Giovanni
from the chaos of the Act 1 finale, was left unexplored.

The
director’s imagination—and the production’s budget—seemed to have been
exhausted on the set, so for the supernatural elements the brave cast were left
to fend for themselves, with minimal props. Dramatically it was feeble, and intellectually
it felt lazy; despite fine work from the cast and orchestra, the production rendered
the performance as a whole distressingly boring.

The cast
dealt with their assignment with the utmost professionalism, however, with a
particularly fine double act from Ildebrando D’Arcangelo’s suave Don Giovanni
and Luca Pisaroni’s edgy and sophisticated Leporello. Lenneke Ruiten at times seemed
a little stretched by Donna Anna’s music, but brought fire to the
characterization, while Anett Fritsch was a fearless Donna Elvira. Andrew
Staples’s voice sounded slightly fuzzier than usual as Don Ottavio, but the
tenor sang with impressive breath control and impeccable Mozartian elegance.
Valentina Naforniţa and Alessio Arduini made a fine, handsome couple as Zerlina
and Masetto. Tomasz Konieczny, as the Commendatore, did what he could to bring
gravitas to a character otherwise robbed of all dramatic power by the
production.

There was
high-quality playing once again in the pit, where Christoph Eschenbach conducted
the Vienna Philharmonic in a straightforwardly traditional account of the
score, in which no tempo jolted and no texture was unduly alarming. In Act 1,
in particular, though, the dynamic range tended to feel limited, rarely
dropping below mezzo forte. The musical performance was admirable on its
own terms, and it’s probably unfair to complain; nevertheless, given the dearth
of ideas on stage, a few more ideas in the pit might have been welcome.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.